News feminist philosophers can use

Manly Food March 7, 2012

We’ve posted a few times about the trend to gender food. Whether it’s ‘women laughing alone with salads’ or attempts to ‘butch up’ cupcakes, seem food is ripe for gendering. There’s a nice post over at Sociological Images about this that’s worth reading. My favourite is Mammoth Supply company’s attempt to make manly iced coffee, yogurt, and assorted dips.

My favourite of instance of gendering products is the desperate attempt to make skin products appear manly. Rather than calling it ‘moisturiser’, they call it ‘Targetted Skin Defence System: Turbo’ and put a picture of a jet and a gun sight on the front. Another tactic is, since shaving is a manly grooming activity, to associate other unrelated products with shaving. So they’ll have a moisturising after-shave thing, and then a separate daily moisturiser called ‘Post-Shave Moisturiser’, even though strictly speaking, moisturising doesn’t have anything to do with shaving.
I always enjoy stopping by the men’s skin section in Boots for a laugh at how preposterous it is.